Well I raid six hours a week and play about 4-5 hours on Heroic runs and dailies. I”m the perfect example of “casual”. My thoughts on raiding?

The question is what Blizzard want’s us to do in raids. On a simplistic level they need to give us plenty to do so we can keep paying them the monthly fees.

And yet, IMHO, they are also doing something else with “raids”. They’ve made them simple enough so that all the players can see the content and experience the Arthus story. Patch 3.3 is all about taking on Arthus. Blizz want’s as many players as possible to experience that.

WoW is very much centered around the player experiencing the “story”.

I see instances like little chapters now: all part of the narrative the Lich King expansion has been telling us.

I don’t think that the problem is that raids are too easy (or at least, since I’ve never actually *done* one – well, I pugged Sarth-10 in a “we DPS through the portals and heal through the lava” way) so much as that by making Raiding accessible to everybody, Blizzard is basically saying that everybody is *expected* to raid, which means that you wind up with a bunch of people raiding who don’t actually particularly want to do it.

Weirdly, I think that the changes to the badge system will help – if people can get Ulduar-25 quality gear from running heroics, they’ll only do it if they want to, which hopefully means that that Blizzard won’t have to worry about people getting frustrated that they can’t do the content.

I wonder sometimes if hardcore comes down to how much you really care about the game. I’ve known non-raiders who put many more hours in than I ever did, for example. Just people get competitive about proving how much they care, and you get some crazy behaviour. (and Im reminded of someone who commented that anyone who blogs about the game is hardcore by definition compared to the majority ).

I know that raiding now is at a good difficulty level for me and my raid. We’re working our way through Ulduar-25 normal modes — got Freya and Thorim this week. I know it’s too easy for the heavy progression guilds, but where do you find the balance. We hope they enjoy the hard modes but all I can say is that I do enjoy it when content is pitched at a good difficulty for me.

I think that you are very optimistic in your timeline for 3.2 to land. I would bet that the first round of PTR testing for 3.2 is the new BG, minus the new Arena instance. If I had to guess, my guess would be that a content patch is at least 3 months out.

I would probably classify Monolith as an above average, but not spectacular, progression guild, I think we were in like the 4th or 5th percentile of guilds to kill Yogg. It took us about 5 and a half weeks to get the kill from the release of the zone. I also think that it is Blizzard’s expectations that people clear Yogg before starting on Hard Modes.

Only 8 more resets to me just seems too fast, and doesn’t really mesh well for Blizzard’s expansion timeline either. Ulduar is huge, and a lot of time and effort was put into it, I think Blizzard intends us to be there a bit longer. Honestly, how many of the “star” guilds have killed Alagon to date? How many are still fighting with Mimiron Hard Mode?

I just think that we are going to have more time than that. Maybe I’m optimistic.

I am also not entirely convinced that the new “Arena” dungeon isn’t supposed to run somewhat concurrently with Ulduar, similar to how MH/BT ran together. I would be surprised, I guess, if this new instance offered another tier of set gear.

The PTR for 3.2 will probably be up in the next week or two, and likely last 4-6 weeks. I think it’s not unreasonable to predict we have less than 8 resets left where Ulduar is the bleeding edge of progression. To put that in perspective, if your 25-man guild hasn’t already taken out a few hard modes, you’re probably going to see no more than a handful of ilvl 239 loots before 3.2 lands. I think Blizzard wants to encourage guilds to give the hard modes serious attempts before the new content lands.

The reality of the game moving forward is that previous “bleeding edge” content often becomes content that only completionists and WoW-tourists attempt. Unless Blizzard surprises us all by making the 3.2 raid instance loot inferior to Ulduar-25-hard loot, hard mode Ulduar will be all but irrelevant–if you’re clearing Ulduar after 3.2 comes out, you’re probably doing it for Val’anyr shards, and the 239 drops will be just ancillary, as you can get the same loot way faster and way easier by rolling over raid3.2 easymode.

So, if they don’t want Ulduar Hard Modes to rot, they do need to tune them down, and they need to do it fast. People don’t have months and months to learn and clear the hard modes because the next tier is coming only 17-18 total resets after the initial launch.

I think Hard Modes are a great idea, a great way to justify spending lots of resources on making raids–much like the 10/25 dual nature of WotLK raids as well. But, Blizzard is definitely still making mistakes and learning from them.

One of their mistakes, I think, is that the gear progression is very shallow in WotLK so far. The difference between a maxed-out T7 raider and a maxed-out normal mode T8 raider isn’t very big. If T8 normal mode was 232 or even 239, they could have left the hard modes tuned hard. I’m sure AAA guilds like Ensidia would have still found a way to make progress with T7-caliber gear, but most “merely” A-guilds would have just farmed out normal for a few months to get a gear edge before really taking these challenges on.

Shallow gear progression means it is very difficult to make raiding accessible for everyone without completely watering down the content. To illustrate, they want a reasonable group of 213-geared players to be able to take out Normal XT002 without too much frustration. Well, 213s aren’t massively better than 200s which can farmed out of heroics–if it’s doable by an average group in 213s, a proficient raid made up of mostly fresh 80s with one clear of Naxx10 under their belt can probably also clear Normal XT002 without much grief.

Similarly, if they want hard modes to be approachable by any but the very top guilds, they needed to make it approachable in 226 gear, which is not that much better than what you were probably already wearing towards the end of 3.0, if you farmed 2D Sarth / Maly / KT in 25-man regularly.

I think if they had built a broader spectrum of gear–something like Heroics 200, Naxx10 213, Naxx25 219, Ulduar10 226, Ulduar25 232, Uld10Hard 239, Uld25Hard 245–you would actually have more of a sensible progression path, one where you could design Uld25 content to punish players who tried to skip directly there from heroics.

We’ll see if Blizzard takes a new direction with hard modes in 3.2, and what conclusions they have come to regarding what did or did not work in 3.1.

@ Aertimus – I do think that Blizzard maybe is errorenously trying to please everyone. I really don’t mind that they want more people to see some of the content the pour most of their resources on, but I would like for them to continue to require a fair level of skill for success. The bar doesn’t need to be set so high as it once was, but perhaps not quite as low as they’ve got it at the moment.

A lot of people complain about a lot of things. However, I do believe that some of the “nerfs” we have seen were warranted. Not all changes are made to “nerf” the content to make it easier. Some of them are to fix flaws in the design that went live for whatever reason.

For example, I 100% agree with the changes to Mimiron. When the actual model of the body obstructed being able to adequately perform on an encounter…yea, that should be changed. (Having people get around the issue by using Baby Spice is not a really great solution). Those changes did nothing to technically “nerf” the encounter, they were probably things that should have gone live and should have been changed before the first guilds got to him and went WTF.

Some nerfs, like Yogg, I saw coming…and mark my words you will see a nerf to tentacle life in phase two “soon”, I would put money on it. I am somewhat on the fence about nerfs like these. Yes, some of the cloud mechanics were ridiculous…but eventually people figured out to stay the hell out of them. Yes the spawn rate on the guardians was somewhat unforgiving. But you did learn to work with that.

I guess I just hope that Yogg isn’t nerfed so much that becomes trivial instead of the proper challenge that he should be. It SHOULD take guilds a some time to learn him and master him. There is nothing wrong with that! Whatever changes Blizzard may have in store for him, I just hope that they maintain the integrity of the encounter.

I’m afraid this comment basically amounts to “may your ancestors be praised” because I have nothing to say that would contribute to discussion or enhance the original post in any way. But I did want you to know that I’d read it, I appreciate it and I think you articulate these thorny issues extremely well indeed.

in fact, if I ever feel the need to express an opinion on this subject again I may well just point in this direction

Can you hear us now? “Ah, the good old days when we only had to worry about what PvP would do to raiding!”